


Blinks

by arctickchild



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Post-Low Chaos Ending, mostly flesh and steel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 19:06:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7186379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arctickchild/pseuds/arctickchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Corvo could have power he never dreamed of. He's happy enough with what he gets instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blinks

The Outsiders fingers are cool against the blackened skin on the back of his hand.

“ _You have the full power of the Void at your disposal._ " His voice is low, rumbling through the hidden room like a wave. " _If you wished it, you could do things most men would never think to dream of._ ”

Corvo is languid and relaxed, at ease here in a way he can never afford outside the crowded walls of Jessamine’s sanctuary. He watches the Outsider’s fingers with the idle curiosity of a half-conscious lover, smoke and oil twisting in the air around them. A part of him - a small, unimportant part - wonders if the illusions are necessary, if the leviathan could simply manifest normally if he wished, but it is outweighed by the knowledge that it doesn’t matter.

“If you’re trying to sell something,” he says, and turns his hand to try and catch the Outsider’s fingers in his palm, “I’d rather you get to the point.”

The slight touch vanishes when Corvo attempts to reach for it, as it always does. There are rules to this, whatever it is, and while they may be ridiculous at times Corvo is too content to try arguing with them at the moment.

The Outsider smiles, small and cryptic.

“ _I could provide you with all the power you could wish for._ ” He moves, out of Corvo’s sight, but his presence fills the room still, amusement and fondness undercut with a faint ripple of frustration. “ _And yet all you will do with it is Blink._ ”

It is an almost childish complaint; Corvo tilts the chair back, leaning against the wall as the Outsider slips like oil away from him, and smiles.

“What more could I wish for?”

~

The first Blink almost kills him.

He’s in the back alleys surrounding the Hound Pits, hidden away in shadow and dust where he can test his new tool without drawing attention to himself, and he overreaches himself - mind still foggy with the physics of the Void and the haste of his flight from Coldridge, he stretches toward the edge of a rooftop, feels the world bend beneath his hands, and he steps -

Into open air.

Time is sluggish around him, the universe still trying to snap back into focus, but he’s still a good six feet from the roof, dangling in midair as he reaches blindly for safety that remains staunchly out of his grasp. The air screeches past him, furious and deadly, and he reaches out again desperately, blindly, the Mark burning on the back of his hand. He isn’t going to make it; power sings through his veins, blood running hot with fear, but he’s too far away and falling too fast and -

He blinks. He hits the roof with shattering force, the decrepit tiles splintering beneath his feet, shockwaves lancing from his heels to his spine as he tucks and rolls forward. He falls out of the roll onto his back, heart racing as he sucks in breath after ragged breath.

He stares up at the clouded morning sky. A crow soars twenty feet above him. His legs ache from impact, swelling to a dull burn up his back. His hand is still warm with the Void’s magic.

 _Incredible,_ he thinks, and laughs deliriously. If he’d had this power in Dunwall Tower - if he’d had it in Coldridge, even - the last six months would have gone so very, very differently.

He sits, pushes himself to his feet. His heart flutters with adrenaline, the back of his neck clammy from terror, but he grins. He stretches his hand out before himself, studying the sigil carved there in oily black lines. _A gift_.

He presses a quick, grateful kiss to the Mark, and looks for a balcony to use on his way back down.

~

In Jessamine’s hidden room, Corvo lets his eyes slide shut, the Outsider’s fingers light across Corvo’s throat. He wonders absently if kissing the Outsider is anything like kissing his Mark - quick and warm, ragged with exhilaration and tasting faintly of the sea and an echo of whalesong. The Outsider’s touch pauses for a moment over his pulse, dances down an invisible path to rest on his chest, and Corvo can imagine the smile twisting the leviathan’s lips. Always such fascination with his heartbeat; he supposes for one whose heart has been still so long, it must sound mysterious as whalesong.

The Outsider’s hand flattens over Corvo’s heart, and he briefly remembers the feel of a heart in his own hands, warm and humming with every beat. He opens his eyes.

“ _I offer you the power to topple empires_ ,” the Outsider muses, “ _and you satisfy yourself with the smallest morsel of it._ ”

He’s closer now, close enough that Corvo can feel the oily wisps brush across his skin, hot and slick. Close enough that if Corvo tried touching him now, he could - but he doesn’t, gaze instead flicking between inky eyes and chapped lips.

“I don’t want to topple empires,” he breathes, and the Outsider’s lips curve into a mocking smile.

“ _Neither did Daud._ ” The name is the shock of cold water through his coat, a thin stream of blood pouring into his mouth and guilty eyes pleading for a hard life. “ _Yet look how close he came._ ”

~

Sparing Daud is an easier decision than Corvo expects.

The fight itself is hell; Daud is quick and strong, and he bends time and space around himself and Corvo as easily as pulling on a glove. But his strikes are too wide, his footing just slightly off, and Corvo can see in his eyes that he expects to lose. He already has the end of this fight painted in his mind, and so with shaking hands and blurry eyes Corvo matches every blow and pays him back double, blinking across the flooded ruins and through crowded rooms in a dance that would only look desperate to those who don’t recognize the steps.

And it ends the way Daud expects it to, with him on his knees and Corvo’s blade on his throat. For a moment Corvo thinks he’ll follow through with it - that he will give the assassin the end he is imagining - Corvo can imagine the spray of blood, the stain he will scrub away on the kelp dotting the riverbed.

He blinks, and he's atop Dunwall Tower, helpless and screaming as Jessamine dies; Daud looks up, a flash of recognition narrowing hard brown eyes – and then he turns and vanishes, blinking back across the rooftops with his men, leaving Corvo to tumble to the stone pavilion, alive.

Corvo looks around the ruins, at the shadows that perch on the tops of the buildings, silently awaiting his decision; he looks down to the Mark burned across his hand, the black lines gleaming in the filthy evening light; he looks to the hand Daud uses to hold himself steady on the rickety old building, his own Mark hidden from view by cloth and angling.

 _His hands do violence_ , the Heart whispers, warm and heavy at his breast, and, _there is no turning back from the path he has chosen._

Corvo is weak and trembling with the after effects of poison and betrayal, and Daud has had him at his mercy twice, and stayed his blade each time. _It made me feel powerful_ , Daud said, but that power had bought him nothing but the blade of a woman he had murdered.

Corvo steps back, reaches out and blinks away, away from Daud and his power, away from the rune he can hear singing nearby, away from the echo of himself he can see in the man's face. _If I had had this power when Jessamine was alive_ , he'd wondered, but he knows what he would have done with it; he would have reached for more, and more, all in the name of protecting his Empress.

But he doesn't need power. He doesn't _want_ power.

He blinks.

~

Time is hazy here.

The Outsider's palms are warm against Corvo's chest, against his stomach, against the knotted scars on his back; his fingertips are cool across his neck, dancing with his pulse and leaving burning trails across his skin. Corvo isn't sure how long they've been here, how long he has until the leviathan grows bored of his explorations and leaves. The Void seeps into the fabric of the room, seconds stretching to years and days shoved into heartbeats.

He wonders if Emily is still asleep; he wonders if the night has passed by in these few eternities; he wonders at the way the Outsider's breath seeps into his bones, the soothing shock of the leviathan's touch against his skin.

“ _Fascinating_.” The Outsider hums the word the way Corvo had once thought _incredible_ , awed and intrigued and more than a little out of breath. He tilts his head, opens one eye to watch as the god pauses with his lips a breath away from his heart, his fingers curling around the wrist that slopes into Corvo's Marked hand. “ _You crawl through death and sewer pipes to find my shrines, and ask for nothing._ ”

“Maybe I just wanted some advice.” Corvo hums as his fingers trail down, across his palm and back over to trace the Mark. “You always say the most useful things, after all.”

The Outsider leans back, mouth twisted in amused disapproval, and Corvo grins, leaning forward. The clatter of the chair against the floor is lost somewhere in the Void’s shadows, Corvo’s breathing curling over the leviathan’s chin like steam.

“If you really want to reward my devotion,” he says, quiet and echoing in the chamber’s walls as his gaze daets between blue-speckled oil and chapped lips, “I’m sure I can think of something.”

And the Outsider smiles, drawing closer to the sudden racing of Corvo’s heart. “ _And still, you ask for so little._ ”

~

The last adult to kiss Corvo was Callista, a brief press of lips to his cheek when he pulled into dock after Campbell’s branding. It is chaste and grateful, arms wrapping too tightly around him as he goes rigid, and it takes a few seconds before Corvo remembers how to react; seconds filled with Jessamine’s blood staining his coats, with Emily’s desperate scream echoing in his ears, his shoulder aching from a lucky shot by an assassin and expressions gone flat from grief and not the deep scar carved across his face.

But he does react, eventually, sliding his arms around her as she starts to pull away with an apology on her lips. It’s been so long since someone raised a hand to him in anything but violence that he feels lost, unsure of his footing even as he clings to Callista with the desperation of a drowning man.

“I’m sorry,” he says, the first thing he says since his escape that feels genuine. He expects Callista to pull away, expects confusion and fear, but she tightens her hold and presses her forehead to his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she says again. “Thank you for saving him. I know you tried everything.”

Corvo thinks of Geoff Curnow’s body curled over his shoulder, the firm beat of his heart steadying him through Blink after Blink as he searched for a safe spot to stash the unconscious guard, thinks of how he could have saved Jessamine the same way, thinks of how strange it feels to be hugged for doing a duty he once devoted his life to.

 _He’s lucky to have you,_  Corvo thinks, but this time he holds his tongue, and releases her.

“Careful,” he tells her, manages a smile that doesn’t feel half as forced as it has the past days. “People will talk.”

Callista laughs, and pulls away from him. “You’re a good man, Corvo,” she says. “Even if you try to convince everyone you’re crazy.”

He’s tempted, in that moment, to tell her everything; the months at the torturer’s hands, the nightmares he still has of Jessamine’s accusing eyes, the way the Void seeps into the fabric of the universe around him and makes him just enough that he will never fail his duty again. To make her see that he may not be crazy, but he is  _different,_  in ways that they would never expect.

Instead he ruffles her hair, smiles at the scowl she gives him. “Best not spread that around,” he suggests. “I have a reputation to uphold, after all.”

~

The Outsider kisses Corvo the way he touches him, languid and curious and very, very thorough.

His fingers trace a path from Corvo’s neck to his wrist, dart up and across to settle over his chest, repeating the journey with every shift between them, every dip of his tongue between Corvo’s teeth, mental notes to accompany a map that can only lead somewhere good. He lets the leviathan play his game for a few seconds, exploring the contours of Corvo’s mouth at his leisure; and then he surges up, pressing the god back against the desk.

Kissing the Outsider is like tasting a storm, power and sea salt sparking through his mouth and dancing through his bones. It leaves him breathless, leaves the blood singing through his veins, leaves a cool taste along his teeth; Corvo remembers the first heart-stopping fall after escaping Coldridge, remembers wondering if it would be the end of him, the shock of the river water through his clothes, and he slides a hand around the Outsider's neck, up into surprisingly coarse hair, back down to trace the contours of his shoulders through his heavy coat.

And the Outsider slips like smoke from his grasp, an echoing laugh in the now empty room, and a lingering command:

_Come find me._

 

**Author's Note:**

> HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE
> 
> im excited about dishonored 2 so i decided to brush this ancient thing off and cut the last two pages so it didnt get more rambly than it is, sorry and also DISHONORED 2 COMES OUT NOVEMBER 11TH I'M SO FREAKING STOKED PUNCH ME IN THE FACE


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